Quade's Macho Moment

For some reason or other, Chicago sports columnists love the macho moment, the time when the boss stomps out of the dugout and just virtually bops an under-performing player or takes him out like in the famous Bobby Cox incident with Andruw Jones that commentators are always gushing over. Anyway, Quade benched Starlin Castro for two days and according to Paul Sullivan, this is sure to win him points with Jim Hendry as a stand-up guy.

Now I have no idea what transpires in a major league dugout in the way of mentoring or instruction, especially having watched the Cubs most closely for so many years. In the case of Piniella, it seemed almost everyone was asleep or smashing up the Gatorade dispenser until Carlos got pissed off and then all hell would break loose. I would, however, imagine that when a player messed up, someone would have occasion to mention it, but maybe in Cubdom this is considered bad form.

I've got nothing against giving Castro a breather to slow things down and get his bearings. Maybe it will work. The kid has a lot of talent, but in the field he plays out of control. Forgetting how many outs there were was rather an uncharacteristic blunder on his part, but maybe Quade saw it as an indicator of a deeper lapse of concentration. It should certainly not require two entire ballgames to learn to count to three, though, and one wonders if this kind of public humiliation is always the right action.

I suppose it depends on the player. One thing you do not want to do to a young player is destroy his confidence. Castro went 1 for 4 in his return to the lineup, made an error in the first inning when he hurried a play, but otherwise he made several excellent plays in the field. Not a whole lot of difference. Castro's problem is that he plays out of control and probably needs to relax more and to figure out who is running and so on. These things will come in time. He might benefit from spending some time in winter ball with a really good infield coach.

Some other interviewers talked about whether the same sort of treatment might be usefully employed with veteran players, but it was hard to figure out what Quade's answer to them really meant. One would like to think they had in mind some of the more obvious candidates on the roster known for their casual lack of hustle or baseball intelligence or both. Alfonso Soriano comes to mind as an example on both counts, but whenever he sees the lineup card, his name is still there. In the Mets series he hit a three run homer, but he botched up a flyball to the warning track that he played into a two-run double that ultimately resulted in three runs scoring in the inning and he let a perfectly routine single bounce through his legs in the Dempster game, opening the floodgates for three more runs. And these were just the most obvious misplays. None of them mattered to the outcome, but the accumulation of bad play takes its toll. I'll be impressed with Quade's macho when he takes on a bigger fish.

Actually, Quade had the opportunity to do so very early in his managerial stint, when Alfonso watched a couple of balls fail to reach the seats and in the infamous case in Washington when he watched the RF miss a popup and knock his own breath out. Anyone else would have had an inside the park home run. Steve Stone and some of the other commentators called Quade out on not taking any action in this case. I hate to harp on Soriano all the time, but I just watch this guy and even on TV, you can see that he rarely makes the right decision in the outfield both in his route to the ball, his handling of the ball, the base he chooses to throw to, the accuracy of his throw, etc. And this criticism does not even take into account his atrocious situational hitting.